I wish I could remember 1956.
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I just strolled down 86th from 14th to 15th (using Google maps street view). That section of 86th doesnāt have a lot of shopping appeal for me , but it does have a coffee shop called āCafe Gossipā which looks like a fun place to stop and have a coffee & snack.
The section of 86th St with which I was familiar (as a kid) was from 3rd Avenue to 5th Avenue. In those days (the '50s) there were stores of every kind, but the one that is most firmly etched in my memory is the appliance store where I saw my first color TV. Walter Cronkiteās face was a bilious shade of green 
, and if the storeās staff had tuned and adjusted that TV to the best of their ability, then it must have been a really poor-quality TV.
What was most memorable about that TV was its price, $500. Since the average annual salary in those days was a bit less than $3,500, those early (crappy) color TVs were clearly only for the affluent.
My recollection of the first color TVs was they were all bad. Some color was better than none color and too much was even better! What I later called the Cheetos effect. Unnatural skin colors that were significantly over saturated and bleeding well beyond the limits of the object.
We just installed an 85" TV. I canāt recall now the actual screen size of our first TV when I was a kid but it was so small, everyone had to crowd around it and the image quality was very bad. For many years, the family TV was a 13" B&W. Many years later, a more affluent family was tossing out a color console that I took home and fixed. Our first color TV. Funny, they wanted it back after I fixed it, but no way. I canāt imagine what my parents reaction to an 85" TV would have beenā¦
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I must say, thatās pretty rude. They shouldnāt have said anything imo, but if they really wanted it back they should have offered you a $$-amount to try to buy it from you. I run into this same problem from time to time and I usually quote a for-sale price, then they lose interest.
It came right after 1955, and just before 1957. I think I was out of diapers by thenā¦
In 1963 or 4, My Dad brought home an RCA XL something model color console all tube driven TV made in upstate NY. I was the biggest available at the time, a 25 inch monster that took up a corner of the living room, and could heat the whole room in the winter. He won it in some sort of contest. It had a remote control even. Every time you wanted to watch something you had to turn it on about 15 minutes before the program began, so the TV could warm up. Once it warmed up he would adjust the color, brightness and tint and was able to get a really good picture, mostly because we also had a clan signal from a power rotated antenna on the roof. Every time you changed the channel youād have to adjust the antenna and then the color to get a nice picture. Watching TV was more of an event than it is now. We got channels from Syracuse, Rochester and several Canadian stations from across Lake Ontarioā¦ a grand total of maybe 14 or 15 channelsā¦ and we felt lucky to be able to get so many.
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